3,570 research outputs found
Towards trajectory anonymization: a generalization-based approach
Trajectory datasets are becoming popular due to the massive usage of GPS and locationbased services. In this paper, we address privacy issues regarding the identification of individuals in static trajectory datasets. We first adopt the notion of k-anonymity to trajectories and propose a novel generalization-based approach for anonymization of trajectories. We further show that releasing
anonymized trajectories may still have some privacy leaks. Therefore we propose a randomization based reconstruction algorithm for releasing anonymized trajectory data and also present how the underlying techniques can be adapted to other anonymity standards. The experimental results on real and synthetic trajectory datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques
Ontology-Based Quality Evaluation of Value Generalization Hierarchies for Data Anonymization
In privacy-preserving data publishing, approaches using Value Generalization
Hierarchies (VGHs) form an important class of anonymization algorithms. VGHs
play a key role in the utility of published datasets as they dictate how the
anonymization of the data occurs. For categorical attributes, it is imperative
to preserve the semantics of the original data in order to achieve a higher
utility. Despite this, semantics have not being formally considered in the
specification of VGHs. Moreover, there are no methods that allow the users to
assess the quality of their VGH. In this paper, we propose a measurement
scheme, based on ontologies, to quantitatively evaluate the quality of VGHs, in
terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization, with the aim of
producing higher-quality anonymizations. We demonstrate, through a case study,
how our evaluation scheme can be used to compare the quality of multiple VGHs
and can help to identify faulty VGHs.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, presented in the Privacy in Statistical
Databases Conference 2014 (Ibiza, Spain
A look ahead approach to secure multi-party protocols
Secure multi-party protocols have been proposed to enable non-colluding parties to cooperate without a trusted server. Even though such protocols prevent information disclosure other than the objective function, they are quite costly
in computation and communication. Therefore, the high overhead makes it necessary for parties to estimate the utility that can be achieved as a result of the protocol beforehand. In this paper, we propose a look ahead approach, specifically for secure multi-party protocols to achieve distributed
k-anonymity, which helps parties to decide if the utility benefit from the protocol is within an acceptable range before initiating the protocol. Look ahead operation is highly localized and its accuracy depends on the amount of information the parties are willing to share. Experimental results show
the effectiveness of the proposed methods
Privacy Preservation by Disassociation
In this work, we focus on protection against identity disclosure in the
publication of sparse multidimensional data. Existing multidimensional
anonymization techniquesa) protect the privacy of users either by altering the
set of quasi-identifiers of the original data (e.g., by generalization or
suppression) or by adding noise (e.g., using differential privacy) and/or (b)
assume a clear distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive information and
sever the possible linkage. In many real world applications the above
techniques are not applicable. For instance, consider web search query logs.
Suppressing or generalizing anonymization methods would remove the most
valuable information in the dataset: the original query terms. Additionally,
web search query logs contain millions of query terms which cannot be
categorized as sensitive or non-sensitive since a term may be sensitive for a
user and non-sensitive for another. Motivated by this observation, we propose
an anonymization technique termed disassociation that preserves the original
terms but hides the fact that two or more different terms appear in the same
record. We protect the users' privacy by disassociating record terms that
participate in identifying combinations. This way the adversary cannot
associate with high probability a record with a rare combination of terms. To
the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first to employ such a technique
to provide protection against identity disclosure. We propose an anonymization
algorithm based on our approach and evaluate its performance on real and
synthetic datasets, comparing it against other state-of-the-art methods based
on generalization and differential privacy.Comment: VLDB201
Literature Overview - Privacy in Online Social Networks
In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an important\ud
part of daily life for many. Users build explicit networks to represent their\ud
social relationships, either existing or new. Users also often upload and share a plethora of information related to their personal lives. The potential privacy risks of such behavior are often underestimated or ignored. For example, users often disclose personal information to a larger audience than intended. Users may even post information about others without their consent. A lack of experience and awareness in users, as well as proper tools and design of the OSNs, perpetuate the situation. This paper aims to provide insight into such privacy issues and looks at OSNs, their associated privacy risks, and existing research into solutions. The final goal is to help identify the research directions for the Kindred Spirits project
You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information
Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily
interactions and communication in the digital world. Yet, surprisingly,
metadata are often still catergorized as non-sensitive. Indeed, in the past,
researchers and practitioners have mainly focused on the problem of the
identification of a user from the content of a message.
In this paper, we use Twitter as a case study to quantify the uniqueness of
the association between metadata and user identity and to understand the
effectiveness of potential obfuscation strategies. More specifically, we
analyze atomic fields in the metadata and systematically combine them in an
effort to classify new tweets as belonging to an account using different
machine learning algorithms of increasing complexity. We demonstrate that
through the application of a supervised learning algorithm, we are able to
identify any user in a group of 10,000 with approximately 96.7% accuracy.
Moreover, if we broaden the scope of our search and consider the 10 most likely
candidates we increase the accuracy of the model to 99.22%. We also found that
data obfuscation is hard and ineffective for this type of data: even after
perturbing 60% of the training data, it is still possible to classify users
with an accuracy higher than 95%. These results have strong implications in
terms of the design of metadata obfuscation strategies, for example for data
set release, not only for Twitter, but, more generally, for most social media
platforms.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures. Published in the Proceedings of the 12th
International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018). June
2018. Stanford, CA, US
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